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The Rust Belt Fables
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Rust Belt Fables was a book of articles first published in 1981 by Ron Jenkins, a Cleveland-born author and researcher. The Rust Belt, from where Jenkins got the name, is a geographical area of the midwest that's annually losing population in part to the failing of steel mills and other factories.
He and his team of assistants, made up of mostly Case Western Reserve University graduate students, visited and recorded many alleged ghost sites in the latter part of 1970s. Their research proved default until their visit of the St. Dominican Church and Priory in 1978 (Youngstown, Ohio), where Ron and 12 others encountered a room of skulls that had previously been locked up inside the defunct church's basement cell.
The skulls were analyzed and the results indicated that the collection was that of a missing Boy Scout group, 128 N.E. Ohio, that went missing in 1929 outside Alliance, Ohio.
The Discovery Channel did a documentary on the articles in January 1993. The show, titled "Ohio Haunted", details the chronicles of the troop, who had 17 members including two cub leaders (only 15 skulls were found), and traces the missing two persons to respective homes in Alliance - The Castle, as its known to locals and currently owned by the Alliance School Board, and two homes on Miller and Clark Avenue, off the steel-belt drag of State Street, parallel to OH-62. Penn Avenue off Mount Union College has had ghost sightings as well.
Jenkins claims the Discovery Channel show to be immoral, citing that his book never claimed ties to any particular sites, let alone outside Youngstown. Alliance, home of a young demographic, has since forgotten about the missing troop, though many elders claim to remember the event, some even remembering the homes of the vanished.
The Fables tells of other haunted articles backed by research, including the Youngstown Cremery and the Mansfield Prison, both now empty and used as annual Halloween draws.
Against popular belief, over 10,000 witnesses have backed The Rust Belt Fables, claiming them true through proof.